In the midst of furious coronavirus work, scientists must also socially distance in the lab

Elizabeth WeiseUSA TODAY

Monday

Apr 6, 2020 at 11:51 AM

There’s a reason Camille Parmesan’s living room is overrun with caterpillars, and it has to do with science and the coronavirus pandemic.

When France announced it was enacting a nationwide 15-day lockdown, the biologist, who studies the impacts of climate change on insects and plants, looked around her laboratory and greenhouse and realized she had a problem.

She's documenting the shifting ranges of butterfly species across Europe and her lab held multiple species of caterpillars, all of which would soon become butterflies, and the plants to feed them. They needed feeding four times a day and leaving them to starve wasn't an option.

“We just kept loading up the car over and over and over again until we had all of the plants and the caterpillars and our computers in the house,” said Parmesan, who is a research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research Theoretical and Experimental Ecology Station in Moulis, France.

In the midst of a medical emergency caused by a new disease that requires intense investigation, scientists have to figure out how to socially distance themselves in laboratories once teeming with grad students, post-docs and interns.

Like the rest of the world, research laboratories are shutting down everything non-essential and sending everyone but a few scientists home to shelter in place.

Thankfully for Parmesan, she and her research partner and husband Michael Singer live not too far from the research station, which is in the south of France, south of Toulouse.

Normally the caterpillars would be housed in special rooms in a lab. Once they turn into butterflies the pair would study which host plants they prefer.

“Now they’re all over our living room. We can’t leave them outside because the birds will eat them,” she said.

Turning a living room into an insect culture room is just one of the ways scientists are adapting to life during coronavirus. In other places, it can also mean allowing only one person in a lab at once, rationing time at crucial machines, staying home to write papers and trying not to breathe on each other.

That's meant moving critical lab meetings to video, amping up email interactions and automating wherever possible. But some tasks, especially those involving virus samples, have to be done physically.

While it might seem there'd be lots of room in the newly-emptied labs to spread out, they are often more cramped than the glistening, expansive workspaces shown in movies and TV.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota Medical School are struggling with the tension of keeping people apart while also needing to let researchers work.

“We have rooms full of flow cytometers so we’re only allowing one person in the room at the time,” said Marc Jenkins, who directs the center for immunology at the school. The machines measure the chemical characteristics of cells.

“We’re trying to find our way through this,” he said.

The good news is many of the complex machines that do critical tests and measurements are also highly automated. One staffer can go in and load hundreds of samples into a system and set it to run for days at a time. The results upload to a network where the researchers can puzzle over them at home. Some can even be robotically controlled by computers.

But not everything is automatic. At the University of California, San Francisco, infectious disease researchers working on COVID-19 are rationing lab time and assigning shifts for access.

“We have at most two people in the lab at one time, to minimize potential exposure between lab members," said Charles Chiu, a professor of medicine and infectious disease there.

Rigorous hand washing and avoiding close contact is enforced, and gloves and other protective material are worn when manipulating samples.

Anyone leaving the lab takes off their gloves and washes their hands again before walking out, so they don’t contaminate the doorknobs.

“Knock on wood, we haven’t had any cases,” Chiu said.

It is, however, an excellent time to be crunching data, said Kristian Andersen, a professor at Scripps Research, a non-profit biomedical science research facility in La Jolla, California.

“The good news for me is that a lot of the work we do is computational,” said Andersen.

Many of his researchers can work from home on their computers, connecting to the Scripps network but not having to go into the lab to work.

“We’ve been ramping down experiments,” Andersen said.

The only non-COVID-19 experiments allowed to continue were long-term ones that couldn’t be shut down without jeopardizing years of work. Even those have been reduced to the absolute minimum necessary to keep alive yeast cultures and populations of everything from mice to fruit flies to zebrafish fed.

In Portland, Oregon, the Oregon Health & Science University has shut down all non-essential research.

“If you’re doing experiments that have to be done, they’re trying to limit it to one person per lab. It is very challenging right now,” said Mark Slifka, a professor of microbiology and immunology.

He's trying to look on the bright side as he's sequestered in his home office. “It’s a very good time to write papers and grants."

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